The chaplain was apologetic. "I'm sorry, sir, but just about all the prayers I know are rather somber in tone and make at least some passing reference to God."
"Then let's get some new ones. The men are already doing enough bitching about the missions I send them on without our rubbing it in with our sermons about God or death or Paradise. Can't we take a more positive approach? Why can't we all pray for something good, like a tighter bomb pattern, for example? Couldn't we pray for a tighter bomb pattern?"
This was one of those books I had been planning to read for quite some time, and it was as good as I expected. It is an interesting read, since it is written in quite an unusual way. The story is not told in a chronological order, instead you are told events in a way that all the pieces are presented as different characters are introduced and explored. Heller keeps feeding you different parts of the story and only giving you hints to when the events occur. The hints on the timeline are given in a very clever way, by using the number of mandatory missions pilots have to have before they can be sent home, which keeps going up as the war progresses.
The story is really interesting and Heller really twists things up as you go, by starting the book in a very humorous tone, that eventually turning it into a dark humor that really paints a grim image of war. Better than the plot in my opinion, was the prose. Heller, to me, writes some of the funniest proses I've ever seen, and even when I felt that the plot was dragging a bit, I never felt compelled to quit, because there were so many hilariously absurd dialogues.
Overall, this was a great book, and a must for anyone looking to read a classic WWII satire. In the next while I would like to read Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, as I've heard it is also a good satire. For now however, I will leave Catch-22 with a 8.5/10.
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